Colorado College Bulletin

Made in the Shade

(also see CC's Trees:  A Timeline)

By D'ARCY FALLON

To some people, trees provide more than beauty, shade, fuel, and protection -- they’re a living link to history, a repository for memory.

Perhaps that’s why an early proposal from an outside planning firm didn’t win over the campus community. The firm, hired in 1993 to embody order in CC’s master plan and to open up vistas to Pikes Peak, proposed removing many of CC’s trees, including its European lindens, American elms, and silver maples.

The idea was to create a more open feeling in the main quad, a sense of place.  Long, formal allées of trees were proposed along certain campus corridors. The configuration was very East coast, very Ivy League.

Colorado College isn’t one of those Eastern colleges, though. It has its own identity.

When Colorado College was first built at the foot of Pikes Peak, the land was barren. Early photographs show Cutler Hall, the college’s first building, alone on the bald prairie, looking as boxy and out-of-place as a Frigidaire on a windswept beach. There wasn’t a tree in sight.

Frederick Tuckerman, one of two members of the first graduating class of Colorado College in 1882, wrote that the building reminded him of the Psalmist’s simile for loneliness. Cutler Hall looked like “a pelican of the wilderness ... an owl of the desert ... a sparrow alone upon the house-top.”

A century later, Colorado College is an urban Eden, a botanical show-off in a region that is high and mostly dry. Mature Colorado blue spruce, ponderosa pines, maples, and honey locusts are just a few of the different types of trees growing on the lush green campus.

Some of the three dozen European lindens on campus were shipped here from England around the turn of the century by Gen. William Jackson Palmer, who founded Colorado Springs. The park-like campus is steeped in horticultural history. Bristlecone pines -- among the oldest tree species on earth -- thrive here.

Some of the trees date back to the days when Colorado College had a forestry school. Groups of students would trek out to the nearby experimental forest to dig up trees, then head back to campus to plant them. It’s also where 1940s coeds cultivated Victory gardens in the quadrangle by Palmer Hall.

It seems as if every grassy field and copse of trees on campus tells a story.

In 1998, college officials revisited the controversial landscape proposal and brought in Civitas, Inc., a Denver landscape architect firm. After reviewing the campus master plan, they came up with an alternative landscape scenario that calls for leaving most of the trees on campus and planting more, particularly oaks and lindens. The idea is to enhance the landscape already here by defining the campus boundaries, said Civitas landscape architect Bob Kronewitter. 

“We want to make the campus more distinctive, give a sense of entrances to the campus, and create more special spaces for students,” he said. The trees would add those “spaces” by providing shade, privacy, and informal borders.

Civitas envisions ringing the main quadrangle with hardy, flowering crab apple trees, as well as lining the walkway between Mathias Hall and the Worner Campus Center with more locust trees. The plan for Colorado College calls for a balance between the historic landscape and the native one.

Landscaping is only a small part of the comprehensive Master Plan, which is designed to address such issues as lighting, architecture, roadways and walkways. The Design Review Board -- made up of Colorado College’s faculty, students and staff -- wants a sense of coherence and continuity in the plan, thematically tying together such diverse elements as eclectic architecture, pedestrian walkways, and parking lots.

College landscaping, however, is central to the master plan, said Laurel Watkins, the chair of the DRB and a professor of linguistics.

“I think on this campus, trees represent history,” she said. “In a sense, they’re a link to the traditions that are present on other campuses, particularly the European lindens. The trees offer protection from the very harsh plains climate here. They are life. They’re points of emotional attachments.”

Economics and business Professor Larry Stimpert, another member of the design board, agrees. “The new plans build on the wonderful park-like atmosphere of the central quadrangle while adding landscaping and design elements that will provide greater continuity across the campus and take advantage of our great views of the mountains. Our goal is to give the college a distinctive ‘sense of place.’”

“We’re in the preliminary planning stages right now,” adds Tom Nycum, the college’s vice president for business and finance. “The process evolves over time with comments from the campus constituencies.” 

The DRB and other college officials welcome alumni feedback. Readers are welcome to comment by contacting Watkins at the anthropology department or, by email. 

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CC's Trees:  A Timeline

1876
CC President E.P. Tenney urges townsfolk to donate 50 cents toward campus tree planting (80 planted in one month).

1881
Tenney grows alfalfa and other crops on campus.

1882
Cutler Hall stands alone in a lonesome prairie

1882
250 trees planted on campus.

1902
R.J. Coryell designs CC’s first traditional landscape plan.

1904
Gen. Palmer ships in European lindens to plant near hall that bears his name.

1905
Colorado School of Forestry becomes department at CC.

1919
Student Campus Improvement Committee recommends corn be removed “and a cleaner appearance of the campus thereby be effected.” President Clyde A. Duniway agrees.

1923
Frederick law Olmstead, famed landscape architect of Central Park in NYC, hired by CC to draft a comprehensive plan. College rejects his work.

1931
Forestry school phased out.

1935
Flood demolishes “the Jungle,” popular meeting place for romantically inclined students.

1940s
Victory gardens flourish.

1952-54
Drought kills lawns and most of the trees Tenney planted.

1957
President Louis Benezet vows “to make campus improvements as fast as flesh and finances allow.”

1958
Campus inventory identifies 18 varieties of deciduous trees, 10 varieties of evergreens, 25 deciduous shrubs, and three varieties of evergreen shrubs.

1966
Campus subcommittee makes case to plant more native varieties of trees and plants.

1986
Class of ’36 plants Norway Maple near Cutler Hall. Other classes follow suit.

1988
Approximately 2,000 trees growing on campus.

1997
Campus masterplan amended because rare lace bark pine — considered one of the best specimens in the country — growing in targeted development area. Tree brought back from China as a seedling by a CC professor more than 60 years ago.

2000
Like others on campus, English Professor Ruth Barton has a favorite tree on Armstrong Quad.

Special thanks to research whiz Molly Wingate, director of the college’s writing center.

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